Perfume Pagoda

Perfume Pagoda

As an alternative to Halong Bay, which we unfortunately had to miss out on due to the typhoon that struck the north of Vietnam while we were in Ninh Binh, we stayed in the Ninh Binh area a night longer. On the first day, the Bich Dong was the most impressive site: the pagodas here are carved into a cave and various paths go up higher from one pagoda to the next. The second day (before returning to the Hanoi airport for our flight to Hue), we managed to visit the Perfume Pagoda which was quite mystique: this temple is also inside a cave but a really huge one, and in order to reach it we needed (besides our car and driver) a rowing boat for the first 4 km, then hundreds of staircase steps, a cable car before we finally could descend down into the temple.